Start of hardware development

Question

I want to start a simple hardware development and hopefully advanced enough to learn from reverse engineering.

I would like to start with a microcontroller and keep in mind a few such as Mbed and Arduino. What should I go with?

I was thinking maybe mbed because it has USB and ethernet functions, among several others, but I really don't know what Arduino is. Will a pirate bus (because it's cheaper)?

I really don't want to program mostly; my current parallax controller is a pain!

Answer 1

I can not recommend Arduino enough. It’s trivially easy to set up and program 100% open source, you can program it using C, C ++, Wiring, there is an excess of tutorials, and most of them are well written and easy to track, you can communicate with it through OSC (which means that you can send and receive commands over the network through Processing, Quartz Compositor, LibLO, etc.).

Check out this link from 40 Arduino projects to see what is possible.

Answer 2

I would recommend you start with Microchip microcontrollers. It's a cheap, simple architecture, and development tools are free. You will need to program in Assembler or C (I highly recommend Assembler for this task).

Answer 3

Get Arduino.

It's stupid, it's easy to set up the tool chain and start writing working code. They are cheap and all open source tools. Since it uses a socket DIP chip, if you fry the chip, you can easily replace it, and you can also take the programmed chip and insert it into your design panel.

As for mbed, do you really want to be sure of your web application to compile your own software?

Answer 4

The choice of a microcontroller will depend on a number of factors:

• what interfaces do you need?
• How do you need to work with mich? (for example, you need to do something computationally intensive, for example, run DSP algorithms).
• how much memory can you need?
• Is power consumption important? (i.e. are you considering battery powered apps?)
• what programming language, development environment, tools, etc. do you want to work (it can be as simple as assembler and there are few or no debugging capabilities, up to cross-compilers, JTAG debuggers, etc.).
• what budget do you have?

Answer 5

I highly recommend the ARM mbed , it is very easy to get started. many libraries are already provided for most common applications (this is relatively new), and it has a “cloud” compiler meaning its web interface, and as long as you have access to the Internet, you do not need any additional software to install on just connect to the network on your computer, write your C-code in the online IDE and it will compile it for you, and you just need to download .bin and copy it to your mbed. It is very easy to use and the community is very useful.

Answer 6

I recommend starting with PIC microcontrollers because they easily understand the program. Development tools are free, and chip programmers are cheap.

Latter, when you are more familiar with the concepts, go to the ARM family because they are cheap and powerful.

Answer 7

Arduino is fine, I really like atmel, but I don't like the avr command set. Avr and arduino are especially popular. Sparkfun.com's Lillypad with an optional USB serial / power device is a good combination, no soldering is needed, and you can start playing right away, one USB port, cheaper. Arduini pro mini is similar, but some soldering (or hanging wires) is required to use it. I would recommend Cordium armmite pro, this lpc is not atmel, but arduino is like and should be combined with other arduino peripherals if you go this way. You definitely don't need the base interpreter that comes with it, it's easy to erase it and use the lpc bootloader to load your own programs (see Lpcstuff.blogspot.com). I / was anti-lpc, but I had to play with mbed on the last day or two after I immediately removed it at the time of the wedding after I received it. Blue LEDs still give me migraines, but the good news is that you are not attached to their web development. You can easily minimize your own programs as you can with arduino and armmite pro. the good thing about mbed is to mount it like a flash drive, and you copy your .bin file to the device and click the button to download it. doesn't get much easier. Another one is sam7s-256. Olimex (note that all of these items are available on sparkfun.com), what I mean is the sam7s-h256 or sam7s-h64 title bar. This is a chip for atmel chip. Atmel is developer friendly, as any avr user will tell you that sam-ba now runs on Linux, which is a requirement for me, it's just a well-made chip and board, ready for use for many. Handle boards can easily tear out arduino / avr boards, although factors are a bit more expensive in these forms. The msp430 family is another good one, get the ez430 directly from TI, and three packages of additional fees are another $ 10, basically four boards for the price of one or half of one of the above items). A very good set of instructions, good tools (gcc 4.x, llvm). I would have avoided the photo, I’m sure that many people, including me, have cut their teeth in the pic. From the general point of view of the user from the number of easy-to-use boards at a good price, it’s easy to find and use tools, support groups, examples of web pages they simply cannot compete with hand and avr. And their instruction set is much worse than 8051, which is pretty bad. pic32, which is mips, is another story, still not well packed and user friendly, but the command set is no longer the main problem.

Answer 8

Arduino is great, simple and cheap, there are a lot of documents and examples on the Internet, but I prefer MBed, powerful, faster, memory, on-line compiler, ethernet on board and multitasking of the officially supported library,